Twenty-five years ago, telephone carriers primarily used residential telephone lines to provide voice services to customers. For entertainment, customers typically went outside the home, to movie theatres, to restaurants or parks. Broadcast television was the staple diet for channeling entertainment to homes. The cable industry was nascent and consisted primarily of positioning a big antenna and hooking up line amplifiers to feed the received signals to multiple homes. At that time, telephone carriers were satisfied that their share of the voice services market was unchallenged. The cable operators were too small and too specialized to be of much interest.
Today, the predominant service offered by telephone carriers is still voice services. However the boundary between the cable industry and the telecommunication industry is blurring. Cable companies have not stopped at delivering entertainment media. In particular, they are also delivering data services through cable modems and indicated their intentions to compete with the telephone carriers in the delivery of voice services to residential customers.
As technology has advanced, telephone wires and cable wires to homes have become exactly that, wires. What makes each wire different from any other wire is the services that it can provide to customers. In turn, the service that a wire provides determines its importance and value. The more services a single wire can provide a customer, the more valuable the wire is. Thus, separate wires to a home for each type of service has become less important and is often unnecessary.
Over time, the type of access point/connection to the home has become less important than the services it can provide. While it is possible to evaluate the group psyche and examine human behavior issues to try and determine why predominantly entertainment industries such as cable companies and Internet companies have seen exponential growth patterns, that is not the purpose of this discussion. However, it is important to note that the growth numbers indicate that a mass-market consumer audience when correlated to entertainment has resulted in a market segment that is profitable and is growing. An observation validated by the emergence of cable and Internet companies from humble beginnings to huge conglomerates today.
That observation has two parts. The first part is the growth of a mass-market consumer audience for entertainment provided to the home. The second part is that entertainment has played an equally important role in the emergence of an entirely new revenue sector.
Entertainment can be visual and aural, such as video or movies. Purely visual entertainment can take the form of a book, magazine or newspaper. Aural entertainment can include music, commentary, news broadcasts, and the like. The emergence of an open format for the exchange of visual entertainment over the Internet has been one of the corner stones in the emergence and establishment of dominant online service providers. Entertainment as described above does not differentiate it from information and pure entertainment. However, the differentiator between information and entertainment is more qualitative and subjective. The scope of delivery of these is not necessarily different. Hence, collectively, both visual and aural entertainment can be referred to as media.
For telecommunication companies to compete effectively for customers in the future, they will have to deploy a compelling set of services that include media. These services must at least equate if not exceed the performance of similar services on other networks such as provided by cable companies. It is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.